Why homosexuality can't be genetics

You, OP, obviously seem to have no idea what you're talking about and lack even a simple understanding of the criteria for discussing something like heredity and genetics. I mean, really. Otherwise, I'd debate you. But, I move on. G'bye, everybody, g'bye!

Yet, I fail myself because I feel obligated to at least point out two little nuggets:

#1) Homosexual people aren't "unwilling" to reproduce. If this was the case there wouldn't be so many homosexual parents, nor the issues regularly in the news regarding rights/responsibilities of homosexual parents, adoption by gay parents, etc.

#2) It's incumbent in discussing this issue to understand that homosexuals do not come from two homosexual parents, or even one, generally. Heterosexual couplings are the typical source of homosexual offspring. If you wish to solve the "problem" of homosexuals existing, start with heterosexual people! If you deny a genetic source for homosexuality, consider that this still holds true: heterosexual environments produce homosexual offspring.

The findings may help solve the puzzle of why, if homosexuality is hereditary, it hasn't already disappeared from the gene pool, since gay people are less likely to reproduce than heterosexuals.

Gay genes make women more fertile

I think I've posted this link at least 10 times on ATS. Still people say, "How can gays keep appearing when they don't reproduce?"

We may not reproduce as much but, our sisters and mothers really do! My own family follows this trend from mom's side. Grandma had 10 children, great grandma had 9. Amongst them a large amount of gay or bisexual men have been born. Some of the gay relatives marry young due to local pressure and have a few children and later live a double life or get divorced.

My very gay uncle had 4 children. He stopped having intercourse with his wife soon after and remained non-sexual with her for many years until they divorced and he moved in with a single male school teacher. Another uncle fathered a child in his teen years from a one time experimentation and moved to NYC and has been with a man for over 40 years.

When I became an adult I even charted them through a family tree for a time. The only reason cousins and such haven't produced heaps of children is birth control after they produce the amount of children they want/can afford.

It is so recognizable I'll quietly tell my brother, "Her son will be gay." Years later mom is distraught and complains because her son brought home a boyfriend after he reaches teen years.

I've seen many that keep saying it is nurture. I want to know what type of nuture makes gay males? Nail down the specifics.

It would be poetic justice for our species if we try to "cure" gays and wipe out fertile women and leads to our extinction.

[edit on 15/4/10 by toochaos4u]

We can all agree that EVERYONE starts out as female. Now if you delay the process of what we would normally progress through to become male then you would have a fetus that continues to evolve as female then it goes male. If this process is delayed even more we can get the condition of a Hermaphodite.

Because of this I might agree it is not evolution, but a birth defect that creates a physical condition that is abnormal. In any case I would say it can be either psychological or a physical condition.



[edit on 15-4-2010 by Xtrozero]

Originally posted by skunknuts

Originally posted by DEMONcrats
furthermore.....i view homosexuality as a cleansing process......gay people have horribel genes.....so they dont get 'passed' on.

really i think gay people must have something wrong with there genes......what better way to insure it does not get passed on to the next generation then to make the person not sexually attracted to the opposit sex...you know...the normal staple part of our society.

It's good that we have a resident geneticist here at ATS. For you to have achieved such a high stature, you must have the best of genes. Hitler would like your style

Best,
Skunknuts

P.S. Good thing spelling and the ability to be articulate must not be indicative of a lacking intelligence and poor genes, because that might mean your defensive vitriol says more about you than those inferior gays.

[edit on 4/14/2010 by skunknuts]

well i never(gasp).....thanks for the sarcasm.

ah....articulating thoughts....hmm you may have me on that.Just so you know though only idiots bring up spelling on the internet.

anytime a person brings up spelling on the internet of all places...well its just pretty sad.

Originally posted by toochaos4u

The findings may help solve the puzzle of why, if homosexuality is hereditary, it hasn't already disappeared from the gene pool, since gay people are less likely to reproduce than heterosexuals.

Gay genes make women more fertile

I think I've posted this link at least 10 times on ATS. Still people say, "How can gays keep appearing when they don't reproduce?"

We may not reproduce as much but, our sisters and mothers really do! My own family follows this trend from mom's side. Grandma had 10 children, great grandma had 9. Amongst them a large amount of gay or bisexual men have been born. Some of the gay relatives marry young due to local pressure and have a few children and later live a double life or get divorced.

My very gay uncle had 4 children. He stopped having intercourse with his wife soon after and remained non-sexual with her for many years until they divorced and he moved in with a single male school teacher. Another uncle fathered a child in his teen years from a one time experimentation and moved to NYC and has been with a man for over 40 years.

When I became an adult I even charted them through a family tree for a time. The only reason cousins and such haven't produced heaps of children is birth control after they produce the amount of children they want/can afford.

It is so recognizable I'll quietly tell my brother, "Her son will be gay." Years later mom is distraught and complains because her son brought home a boyfriend after he reaches teen years.

I've seen many that keep saying it is nurture. I want to know what type of nuture makes gay males? Nail down the specifics.

It would be poetic justice for our species if we try to "cure" gays and wipe out fertile women and leads to our extinction.

[edit on 15/4/10 by toochaos4u]

not pretty hard dude.....one only has to look at your family. how many gay family members do you have...if there is more then two......oh boy thats the reason why.

so many gay people in your family.....

reply to post by Nosred


"Fruit flies are among the most sexually proficient creatures on earth. Their ability to produce a new generation in two weeks has made them the darlings of genetics researchers for nearly a century. Put a male fruit fly into a bottle with a female, and he doesn't waste any time before getting down to business.

So it's a bit bewildering to watch the behavior of certain fruit flies at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. There, in the laboratories of biologists Ward Odenwald and Shang-Ding Zhang, strange things are happening inside the gallon-size culture jars. In some experiments, the female flies are cowering in groups at the top and bottom of the jars. The males, meanwhile, are having a party--no, an orgy -- among themselves.

With a frenzy usually reserved for chasing females, the males link up end-to-end in big circles or in long, winding rows that look like winged conga lines. As the buzz of the characteristic fruit fly "love song" fills the air, the males repeatedly lurch forward and rub genitals with the next ones in line.

What's going on?

Without a wink or a chuckle, Odenwald claims that these male fruit flies are gay -- and that he and Zhang made them that way. The scientists say they transplanted a single gene into the flies that caused them to display homosexual behavior. And that's very interesting, they assert, because a related gene exists in human beings, although there is no evidence yet that the human gene has an effect on sexual preference.

A report of Odenwald and Zhang's findings, to be published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, adds to the mounting evidence that homosexuality has genetic origins, and is sure to produce new fireworks in the contentious debate over what it means to be gay. The two scientists are not foolhardy enough to claim that a single gene can make a person homosexual. But they think their studies may yield important new insights into how genetic makeup, through a complex series of biochemical reactions, influences sexual orientation.

Such work stirs mixed emotions in the gay community. To some extent, gays and lesbians welcome the research because it supports what most of them have long felt: that homosexuality is an innate characteristic, like skin color, rather than a perverse life-style choice, as conservative moralists contend. And if that is true, then gays deserve legal protection similar to the laws that prohibit racial discrimination. "On a political level, genetic research does seem to move the debate along a certain path," says Denny Lee of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a gay advocacy group in New York City. "When people understand that being gay or lesbian is an integral characteristic, they are more open-minded about equality for gay Americans."

On the other hand, many gays are wary of the genetic hypothesis. It could, they fear, help promote the notion that gayness is a "defect" in need of "fixing." "Any finding will be used and twisted for homophobic purposes," says Martin Duberman, head of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York. "If it does turn out that for some people, there is a genetic or hormonal component, the cry will then arise to take care of that." Indeed, the cry is already rising.

The Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, president of the Traditional Values Coalition in Anaheim, California, says that if a biological cause of homosexuality is found, then "we would have to come up with some reparative therapy to correct that genetic defect."

No matter how people feel about the issue, it is increasingly hard to argue that genes play no role in homosexuality. The evidence began to pile up in 1991, when studies showed that identical twins were more likely to have the same sexual orientation than other pairs of siblings. That same year, a California scientist reported slight brain differences between gay and straight men, although the conclusion is disputed. And in 1993, an NIH researcher found a stretch of DNA on the X chromosome that seemed to harbor one or more genes affecting sexual orientation. But no one has proved that a particular gene promotes gayness or has offered any convincing theory of how genes could influence a person's choice of sleeping partners.

Odenwald and Zhang do not pretend to have any easy answers. In fact the type of gene they've been studying in fruit flies could not begin to account for the complex variations in human homosexual behavior. For one thing, the gene does not cause flies to renounce heterosexuality altogether. If a "gay" fly is surrounded by females instead of males, he'll fertilize the lady flies. So strictly speaking, the NIH flies are not homosexual but bisexual. And the gene produces no unusual behavior when transplanted into females: the scientists have produced no lesbian fruit flies.

Yet the way the gene works is intriguing, and may offer some clues to the biochemical roots of gayness. Surprisingly, the swatch of DNA in question was discovered long ago, and is one of the most thoroughly studied of all fruit-fly genes. It is called the "white" gene because, among many effects, it influences eye color, and a particular mutation in the gene causes a fly's normally red eyes to be white.

The gene's specific job is to produce a protein that enables cells to utilize an essential amino acid called tryptophan. If fruit flies are unable to process tryptophan properly, then they cannot manufacture red eye pigment.

Under normal circumstances, the white gene is active only in certain cells, including brain cells, and does nothing to disrupt standard sexual behavior. In the NIH experiments, Odenwald and Zhang inserted a normal version of the gene into embryonic flies, but transplanted the gene in such a way that it was activated in every cell. That's what apparently played havoc with the flies' sex lives. With every cell sucking in tryptophan from the blood, a shortage of tryptophan developed in the brain, where it has important uses. Since tryptophan levels were altered, the researchers hypothesize, the brain was unable to make enough serotonin, one of the neurotransmitters that carry messages between nerve cells. Serotonin is a multi-purpose chemical, and abnormal levels of it in humans have been linked to everything from depression to violent behavior. In the case of the gay

reply to post by polarwarrior

Care to explain why all the animal species in nature that have
been observed to display homosexuality have been nurtured into it?

As I recall, it occurs primarily in conditions of extreme population density. For example, breed too many rats in a confined space and many of them will exhibit homosexual tendancies, thus resulting in fewer rats.

I think the implications are fairly obvious.

reply to post by DEMONcrats

]

Yes, that would be easy to explain away as some sort of molestation if I had known them before I was 25. I was not raised close to my mother's side of the family. I was well into being an adult before I was introduced to some of her side of the family when we moved.

I knew of no other gay people until I was in my late teens due to strict religious upbringing. There were rumors about some gay teens in the church before I left but, they were hurried off to some Christian rehabilitation center.

It was through the Internet and researching family genealogy that I stumbled upon some of my relatives. Basically I would find relatives online and asked about family history. Most of them are heavily closeted. Some of them I became close to later. A few were relatives that actually hit on me online but, didn't know who I was. We chat and I'm saying, "Whoa you are a relative!"







[edit on 15/4/10 by toochaos4u]

Originally posted by Nosred
First let me start off by saying I'm not against homosexuality but I have a problem with people saying it could be caused by genetics. The laws of natural selection would never let something like homosexuality to occur in a creature's DNA. If a person was born with a gene that made it unwilling to reproduce it wouldn't be able to pass it on to it's offspring. While I admit the gene could be recessive in some people it would have eventually died out.

Maybe it's nature's way of population control? Regardless of what YOU think, it IS genetic. and saying "it can't happen because of natural selection wouldn't let it happen" is wrong. People are born with genetic disorders. Some people are born with 2 heads! (Although that is a mutation)

It's simply a genetic disorder. Now don't get mad at me calling it a genetic disorder. It just IS. Men and women are made to produce. period. and it's simply a hormonal disorder at birth or even in the womb.

People don't choose to be gay. You really think people want to go through hell, being called names, beaten up at school, and ostracized for the fun of it?

Come on....

Just let people live the life they want to.. It's always RELIGION that attacks the different... Oh... what a surprise. And here we though religions were sooooo excepting. Yeah. right.

[edit on 4/15/2010 by Pharyax]

reply to post by DEMONcrats


Your spelling is still underperforming;say what you will,but GAYS are always more educated....even online!!!

Genetic? Maybe, maybe not - I don't know enough about that aspect of it, but I remember a study that said at least some of it could well be developmental - which is to say subject to conditions the fetus experiences while in the womb.

The "ring-finger" test is said to possibly be an indicator of whether or not a woman is more likely to be a lesbian. One trait most men share is that their ring-finger is longer than their index finger, in most women they are about the same length. This is thought to be a secondary trait determined by hormone levels a fetus experiences while in the womb. Women with longer ring-fingers are apparently more likely to be lesbians than women who do not.

Now, one of my best friends is a lesbian woman - not bi, not sexually confused , just 100% lesbian - never been with a man in her life and no desire to. When I told her about this study she checked her own hands and sure enough, her ring-finger is significantly longer than index finger. We also did an informal poll among a number of her lesbian friends and sure enough, most of them had longer ring-fingers, too. We didn't have a big enough sample to be truly scientific about this, but at least in this little group it seemed to be true.

Another situation that has been noted, the more older brothers a man has, the more likely it is that they will be gay. For a while it was thought this might be nurture thing - boy grows up admiring his older brother, maybe he's more likely to feel close to men later in life. But now it seems that it might have to do, again, with conditions in the womb. A woman who has male children produces hormones at different rates in subsequent pregnancies and this could be what's affecting the development of the later male children, making it more likely they'll be gay.

BBC article about the ring-finger study.

As the article says, this still isn't proven, but it would seem a very plausible theory.

Originally posted by LordBucket
reply to post by polarwarrior

 

As I recall, it occurs primarily in conditions of extreme population density. For example, breed too many rats in a confined space and many of them will exhibit homosexual tendancies, thus resulting in fewer rats.

I think the implications are fairly obvious.

I believe there is also a metaphysical explanation that has to do with the dense urban areas, and possibly high population densities in nature. Ive never really looked into the correlation because I dont really care but I do believe it to be a metaphysical condition to do with the % of past life incarnational gender. I heard if 65% or more incarnations were say female then if you are born male youd have a chance becoming gay (or wanting a sex change, crossdressing etc.), its both good and bad because in part youve realized who your soul really is and it feels great to live true to yourself, but bad in part because it seems more likely to be triggerd by metaphysical "pollution" leading to a rejection of the natural magnetic attraction to the opposite sex in favour of the deeper spiritual attraction. Each soul has both the masculine and femanine component and it is better if the entity embraces the gender they are born into regardless of the past life experience giving a bias to a certain human sex. I havnt thought much on this before I got to this thread so let me know what you think

[edit on 15-4-2010 by polarwarrior]

reply to post by skunknuts


yeah - Dawkins has a great analogy - he suggest there are all kinds of genetic traits, behavioral and physical - which are redundant - such as the gall bladder etc, the gay trait may well have been manifested as staying back with the females in the tribe and offer protection as the non-gay males left to go hunting. The gayness would assure that he would not breed with the females while they were gone......

Originally posted by silversurfer6161
reply to post by DEMONcrats

 

Your spelling is still underperforming;say what you will,but GAYS are always more educated....even online!!!

your brain is still underperforming...i spell most of my words wrong...if anything its grammar that i wrong most of the time.

Try learning the difference.

crap typo...lol. i try to defend myself and i implicate myself.....nothing to o but laugh

reply to post by polarwarrior

I do believe it to be a metaphysical condition to
do with the % of past life incarnational gender.

From my own experience, homosexual tendancies can be an expression of root/brow chakra inversion. Serious solar plexus blockage may also be related, but as a simple experiment, if anyone wants to feel what it's like to be gay, simply take ten minutes and reverse the orientation of your chakras. Take your crown chakra and plant it firmly in your root, and vice versa.

Poof! Instant gay.

There may well be other causes of expression, but this one is easy enough for anyone to try for themselves, as well as to undo. Of course, it's probably easier for someone deliberately creating the condition to undo it than for someone who manifests the condition as a result of previous issues. But as you say, masculine/feminine are properties that we all share regardless of physical gender. If you look at masculine/feminine as simply energies which may or may not match those of the physical body, it's not difficult to create scenarios in which energy seek expression that does not match the physical body.

it is better if the entity embraces the gender they are born into
regardless of the past life experience giving a bias to a certain human sex.

It may be a less "bumpy ride" if the various energies are in agreement, but self-denial creates its own issues.

I think homosexality has a certain tendancy to create consequences which may be unfortunate. But bottling yourself up in self-denial also has consequences. I'm not prepared to tell people which sort of consequences are more appropriate for them to deal with. But neither am I willing to pretend that there will be no consequences simply because it's inconvenient.

In any case, I think shame and guilt are probably more serious issues. Homosexuality may result from strange chakra arrangements and energy blockages, but someone who has homosexual tendancies and chooses to punish themselves and feel guilty and evil about it rather than act on those tendancies is probably doing themselves a greater disservice than someone who accepts their nature and freely acts on it with no guilt or self-punishment.

Of course, someone who acts on it and feels guilty about it probably has it worst.

reply to post by DEMONcrats


I never said gay people have inferior genes, I said its illogical that it can be something inherited through genes. I don't have a problem with gays.

reply to post by Pharyax


Do you understand natural selection? Normally babies with two heads do not live long enough to pass on their traits to their offspring. If it's not a useful trait it dies out.

To clear something up, I do not think heredity is an impossible cause of homosexuality I just think it's illogical to say it's more likely than homosexuality being a choice or caused by a chemical inbalance.

reply to post by troubleshooter


That's taking the idea of plasticity a little too far. I've read Doidge's book and I don't remember anything about homosexuality in it. After birth, plasticity is really only present in the cortex, with neurons making new connections with other neurons. As the other thread discussed homosexuality is correlated to differences in the structure of the amygdala. The brain simply isn't plastic enough to change an entire structure like that, with the exception of the hippocampus, which is the only structure in the brain that continues to produce cells.

On the topic, it may be that people have the gene, but it never gets activated. Just having a gene does not mean it gets expressed as a phenotype. The gene must be turned on before it can produce any kind of result. This is why both genetics and environment play a role in development of personality. Genes rely on cues from the environment, although this environment can either be fetal or post-natal. Considering that this is affecting the structure of the brain I would say the gene is activated by some chemical gradient in the fetus, so if that gradient doesn't exist the gene won't become activated, but the person will still be carrying it. Which is thus a way for the "gay gene" to be passed on between generations. However, with something as complex as sexuality it's most likely that there is no single "gay gene" but it results from the additive process of many genes.